After the Conquest

After the Conquest

12th February @ 09:00

The Woolf Institute, Madingley Road, Cambridge, CB3 0UB

After the Conquest: Converging Approaches to the Study of the Iberian Reconquista (12-14 February: Cambridge)

The Woolf Institute will shortly hold an interdisciplinary workshop: "After the Conquest: convergent methodologies and divergent practices in the study of the Iberian Reconquista, 9th-14th centuries" on 12-14 February 2018.

Popularly known as the Reconquista, the Christian conquest of al-Andalus in the Iberian Peninsula has long been a popular area of research. Although there have been some major breakthroughs over the past thirty years, an historiographical impasse has hindered transnational collaboration between different scholars and schools of thought.

A fundamental aim of the workshop is to go beyond the dominant narrative of conquest, that has framed the Christian military advance in terms of change versus continuity: whether the Christian takeover amounted to a military, feudal conquest breaking with the Islamic past; or whether Latin rule was mitigated by surrender treaties, hybrid ethno-cultural institutions and pragmatic tolerance or coexistence, known as 'convivencia' among scholarly circles and in popular culture.

The workshop starts from the premise that this debate has become somewhat sterile, and hopes that in bringing advocates from different scholarly camps, we can go beyond the established paradigm. The two-day gathering will thus bring together a variety of archaeologists, historians and art historians to discuss different types of evidence, approaches and methodologies, during the different stages of theChristian conquests of Islamic Spain.